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Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Native Plant Gardens -- Why Are They Sometimes Hard to Embrace?

A native plant landscape is not an attempt to "return to some past,
pure nature." That's impossible, especially with climate change (and
philosophically it's wrought with ideological problems -- this
environmental lit PhD knows). But the wildlife that need native plants
and their ecological communities have not gone away -- they certainly
can't evolve within decades or even a century to our imported plant
gardens. We're doing our best to make the wildlife go away through unprecedented
mass extinction, though, and yes primarily in ways beyond our gardens;
but our gardens are entry points into those larger ways / landscapes.

I can point to research that shows we'll lose 30% of global plant
species in coming decades, that the U.S. has unprecedented losses of
songbirds, that kids growing up today will see 35% fewer butterflies and
moths than their parents did 40 years ago, that specific native bee
species need specific native plant species to complete their
reproduction cycle, that one of the most endangered global ecosystems is
prairie and that prairie is great at sequestering carbon and creating
darn rich soil, yet it doesn't seem to hold sway.

Are we too
entrenched in what we believe, or where we're from or how we were raised
and the inherent values of those circumstances? Are we too far removed
from a relationship with nature that doesn't need our hand in it, and
thus would redefine our interactions with it? Are we selfish? Are we
unwilling or afraid to confront the repercussions of our actions,
especially when it comes to private landscapes? In America, are we
uncomfortable with gardens having meaning beyond aesthetics or for
personal use? How much of our sense of Western entitlement and freedom
is at play?

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